The Creed of the Climate Scientist

Taxpayer-funded warmists have no need for sacramental confession to expiate the sins of their wild inaccuracies and habitually incorrect prophecies. As a recent spate of amended theories demonstrates, they just make up new 'facts' and keep those grants rolling in

Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) is the gift that keeps on giving, mainly to its adherents but, yes, also to sceptics for whom it provides an endless source of material upon which we can keep exercising our ‘little grey cells’. For example, I often wonder at what point the CAGW scam will finally expire. There have been two events which, by rights, should have at least given our governments pause in their rush to bankrupt us. The first was Climategate and the second is the warming stasis (better but more unscientifically known as “the pause”). But no, not a bit of it.

CAGW will end either because of a gradual and growing acceptance that the empirical data do not support the proposition of catastrophic warming (i.e. the science, the genuine science, at last triumphs) or, alternatively, there may be some, as yet unpredictable, watershed event (a Berlin Wall if you like) that causes the edifice to come tumbling down.

Regrettably, all the portents (and Graham Woods article Open Letter to an Alarmist Shill only reinforces my fear) are that we will have to rely on the latter. What prompted these thoughts was a series of recent Graham Lloyd reports in the The Australian. Let me say, at the outset, that any observation I make here is no reflection on, or criticism of, Lloyd. He is merely presenting the argument of the ‘climate establishment’.

The Antarctic Peninsula, regarded as a “global warming hot spot”, has been cooling for almost 20 years.

Natural variability was responsible both for the decades-long warming since the 1950s and more recent cooling, according to research published today in Nature.

Good news for sceptics, right? It seems to support the sceptic view that observed 20th century warming was nothing out of the ordinary.

But wait, as is always the case when observed evidence does not mesh with approved climate narrative, a warmist was quick to dismiss those inconvenient thermometer readings:

The research, led by John Turner from the British Antarctic Survey, said while the start of Antarctic Peninsula cooling in 1998 had coincided with the so-called “global warming hiatus”, the two were not connected.

So in this case ‘correlation’ has no significance. The prevarications and provisos foreshadowed by the above quote commence immediately in the following paragraph and dominate the remainder of Lloyd’s article. Just one example:

Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute, London, said the Antarctic Peninsula was one of the regions of the world where warming was greatest over the past 100 years, and now it had levelled off whilst other areas continued warming. “The study does not suggest that global warming has been halted however, and it must not be misconstrued as such,” Professor Siegert said.

There is much more of the same. I don’t intend to examine the article line by line, but suffice to say that a nice line in sophistry is developed (again I emphasize, not by Lloyd) to show that Occam’s Razor, once so popular among climate alarmists when temperature and CO2 were rising at the same time, now, no longer, applies.

The second Lloyd article (August 13) to pique my interest concerned the 19-year warming pause or, as I prefer to call it, warming stasis. It references to a workshop conducted by the US National Academy of Sciences which appears finally to have accepted that temperatures have been flat-lining for close to two decades. Once again, reality is acknowledged but wrapped in hedges, fudges and caveats. The stasis, we are asked to believe, was caused by decadal natural cycles that were strong enough to modulate the warming effect of the CO2 currently accumulated in our atmosphere. These cycles are ‘not considered to be predictable’. Somehow, because of those unknowable short-term variances, the great minds of climatology are better able to state what temperatures will be 2116.

The lack of predictability of natural variability is why climate scientists say they are better able to predict what may be happening in Earth’s climate 100 years from today rather than at mid-century. They are confident the long-term trend is for rising surface temperatures in response to increasing levels of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

In other words, the near-term predictions that we made with 95% certainty twenty years ago may have been wrong but trust us we know what we’re talking about when it comes to the long term. If punters worked to the same rules no bet would be a losing one and every bookie would be an undischarged bankrupt.

On the July 18, ABC Media Watch’s Paul Barry excoriated The Australian for not reporting on a letter from the Coral Reef Symposium to PM Malcolm Turnbull demanding urgent action to protect the Great Barrier Reef from climate change. The letter was no more nor less than a political manifesto that had nothing to do with rigorous science and, as The Australian is edited by better journalists than Barry, the paper was well advised to pass on it.

But, perhaps stung by Barry’s criticism, on August 24, Lloyd did report on a similar political exercise from the self-appointed Climate Institute, which had apparently commissioned a report from an organisation called Climate Analytics on the advantages of limiting global warming to 1.5C rather than 2C. Limiting warming to 2C was the agreed aim of the Paris conference and signatories of the resulting agreement were required to put in place plans for CO2 emission reductions that would contribute to this aim. There were, however, no official guidance as to what levels of emissions would be necessary to achieve the aim. It was simply left up to individual countries to decide ‘how much they could afford to chip in’. So there is an immediate disconnect between the aims of the Paris agreement and the action plans promised by individual signatories. It goes without saying that there are no guarantees countries will do what they say they will do and, by any reasonable reckoning, no possibility their actions would have any measurable effect on global climate if they did.

During the course of the Paris conference an aspirational target of 1.5C emerged, suggesting that whatever was agreed at Paris was just an ambit claim. Here we now have a report which effectively tells us that 2C is not really the goal. It’s the ‘Brisbane Line’ we must not cross and in order to ensure that we don’t, we really need to aim for 1.5C. This report is not based on any specific research project. It is a distillation of the findings of a UN-sponsored, the Structured Expert Dialogue (SED). Their considerations took place over the timeframe 2013-15 and therefore their ‘findings’ were available to the IPCC process before the Paris conference but only surfaced during the conference. Perhaps organizers thought national governments might wonder why they were being asked to sign up to a 2C target when 1.5C was the actual goal.

I decided to have a look at the SED report — a daunting task, as I discovered when I read the first paragraph:

A. Mandate

1. At their forty-first sessions, pursuant to the mandate for a structured expert dialogue

(SED) on the 2013–2015 review given in decision 1/CP.18, paragraph 86(b), the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) requested the co-facilitators of the SED to prepare, with the assistance of the secretariat, a final factual report that includes a compilation and a technical summary of the summary reports on the meetings of the SED and to make it available no later than 3 April 2015.

Suffice to say that what was reported in The Australian was simply another regurgitation of the same old alarmist line, as always couched and designed to keep the momentum going. It should have been filed in the same repository as the Coral Reef symposium non-story. And a week or so ago, in another article by Graham Lloyd, came the latest and best example of the flexibility of CAGW theory.

Here is the first paragraph:

Man-made global warming started earlier and was much greater in the 19th century than previously thought according to two new papers involving international scientists and US space agency NASA.

And where might this amazing new research have originated? Why, our very own ANU:

Research published in Nature today [and] led by Australian National University Professor Nerilie Abram concludes the warming of the planet may have started as early as 1830.

That should set alarm bells ringing from the get-go. ANU has form in the production of dubious climate research, as exemplified by the 2012 paper claiming to show that 20th century warming in Australia was unprecedented in one thousand years, lasted about four hours after publication before it was debunked by Steve McIntyre and subsequently withdrawn.

Anyway, back to Associate Professor Abram’s research. It seems that mainstream climate science has now discovered, by virtue of paleoclimatological reconstructions and model simulations, what meteorological records have always shown and sceptics have repeatedly pointed out: that the world was indeed warming in the 1830s. This apparently came as a surprise to the climate science establishment for whom anthropogenic climate change has generally been talked about as a 20th-century phenomenon.

Here words almost fail me. These people are suggesting the miniscule increase in atmospheric CO2 that might have occurred at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution had an immediate and detectable warming effect. Michael Mann, that grand old man of climate scams, attempted to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period; now Abram and her carbonphobic confreres are working the same magic on the Little Ice Age. Their position appears to be that there can be no warming unless humans can be blamed for it. Emboldened by their success so far in brushing aside all inconvenient truths, climate scientists have reached new heights of brazen effrontery.

Let’s have a look at this re-writing of climate history. What Abram is saying is that, prior to her research, the temperature record did not show warming as early as 1830. Now it does. So she has, in the space of one sentence, written out a warming record (coming out of the Little Ice Age) that coincides with the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, and which has been a matter of public record for decades. Then, courtesy of the ANU research, written it back in again. It’s mind-boggling.

All the above demonstrates quite clearly that, for alarmists, dangerous human induced warming is holy writ and model simulations must always trump empirical evidence which can always be interpretted to confirm preconception. In the grant-fed, careerist conclaves of the climate clerics there is no anomaly that cannot be accommodated.

More than a secular religion, catastropharianism is a cult — and like all cults built around prophecies of doom, the refusal of events to confirm predictions is shrugged off, the omens of pending disaster re-interpreted, and the day of reckoning assigned a new date.

Unlike other doomsday cults, however, your common or garden-variety loonies pay from their own pockets to produce tracts aimed at converting the rest of us.

I have found the site to be both illuminating and infuriating, mainly due to the clarity of explanation and the continued publication of these journal articles that clearly have some issues, respectively. Hopefully common sense will prevail in time. What is truly incredible is how the world will change if CAGW is well and truly debunked (as in emissions mean nothing at all). No funding for renewable from government coffers, no turbines or solar farms, no great leap forward for electrical cars becoming commonplace, schools will have to change entire curricula, island nations having no more income stream etc, Greenpeace, Oxfam etc out of work. It will be quite the watershed.

Perhaps in time we will look back and view this all as something a little embarrassing like phrenology, the Inquisition or the witch trials.

There have been a lot of other socialist inspired ‘scientific social’ policies/theories that have done an immense amount of harm before they eventually faded away. Eugenics being just one of their more recently abandoned ‘social theories’. The media and academics seem have very selective memories when it comes to conveniently overlooking and forgetting such odious practices and theories from the past as they rush to concentrate on the next fashionable excuse the socialists can use to control/manipulate people/society. Dietary fads such as animal/saturated fats being ‘harmful’ to humans is another more recent socialist inspired ‘scientific social theory’ in its death throes. There will be a lot of harm to society in the form of premature deaths due to heart attacks and dementia before this one completely dies.

More than a secular religion, catastropharianism is a cult — and like all cults built around prophecies of doom, the refusal of events to confirm predictions is shrugged off, the omens of pending disaster re-interpreted, and the day of reckoning assigned a new date.

On the subject of Islam, this site is one of the best around. But the agenda behind these never-ending attacks on mainstream climatology can only be ‘business must proceed as usual’: particularly in the fossil-carbon industries.
Forget temperatures; forget thermometers. The atmosphere and oceans together make up a hugely complex system, and the increasing load of the heat-trapping gas CO2 in the atmosphere shows up as increasing energy in that system: which can result in stronger winds bringing cold air up from Antarctica and causing a drop in local temperatures in Australia. This in turn inevitably causes Australian denialosriches to start dancing round with glee, (probably in circles of ever-decreasing radii) and eagerly composing stuff like the latest of Peter O’Brien’s always-so-predictable rants above.
But no matter where those dances are performed, they cannot stop the ‘mercury’ in the huge thermometer we call Planet Earth from registering what is actually going on: by rising.
The atmosphere and ocean of the whole planet is warming, spelt W-A-R-M-I-N-G. This is best indicated not by thermometers, as temperatures are endlessly disputable but by sea level rise, measurable by satellite altimetry to half-millimetre accuracy.
The CSIRO puts the mean rate of rise at 3.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr, which is 33 mm per decade, 330 mm per century and 3,300 mm (3.3 metres per millennium world-wide). That can only be due to glacial ice melt and/or thermal expansion of ocean water.
Nor can it have been going for long, otherwise it would have been noticed world-wide by historians, harbour authorities, and damn near everyone else. This suggests rather strongly that the mainstream climatologists are right, and that it is anthropogenic: ie since the Industrial Revolution got started, around AD 1750, +/- whatever.

DT: You do not have to read anything I write on this site. Have a look at your keyboard. You might find a ‘scroll down’ key.
Use that.
The anti-AGW crowd are sensitive about use of the word ‘denial’. Yet it is a legitimate word to use in the climate debate. Denialists deny that AGW is happening. Just as I deny that they are right.

Funny, as I was reading the tedium I thought “This is tedious”. I wonder if it’s the 97% agreement that was the clincher for him. Or perhaps the fact one uses Wikipedia and the SMH as the source of knowledge? As for the University of Colorado, isn’t that the august school which is offering a climate catastrophe course (what happened 20k years ago when the ice really started melting?) in which the lecturers refuse to have any students who would or will disagree with them? That’s not learning or critical scientific enquiry, that’s just plain stupidity. Well, they are alarmists after more grants and taxes without doing any real work after all I suppose. Now perhaps if he would only just answer en passant’s questions, but then again Greens don’t do that, do they.

Ian, no rational person would ever deny that the climate is, has always been and almost certainly will be changing for ever more. The term “climate denier” is therefore the most ridiculous of expressions.

There are many plausible theories about the causes of climate change but none has so far been proven beyond doubt. On the other hand, it is absolutely certain that CO2 is but a miniscule player in the process. Air trapped in ice core samples prove beyond doubt that the warming of the planet – for whatever reason – comes first, followed by the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere 100s of years later, due to the fact that the warming oceans release more and more of it. Furthermore, any warming since the beginning of the industrial revolution is nowhere near proportional to the resultant increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.

As for sea levels, naturally the sea levels of a warmer planet must increase. However, the rate of increase is so slow that, it ought not cause any alarm. It can be easily accommodated, particularly if we have plenty of cheap, reliable energy at our disposal. Incidentally, some of the loudest alarmists have their mansions by the sea, only a few metres above sea level, so while you are concerned about sea level rise, the are not. So stop fretting.

> “Nor can it have been going for long, otherwise it would have been noticed world-wide by historians, harbour authorities, and damn near everyone else. This suggests rather strongly that the mainstream climatologists are right, and that it is anthropogenic: ie since the Industrial Revolution got started, around AD 1750, +/- whatever”

Actually, the most recent sea level rise [still occurring) started about 12000 years ago, with Bass Strait (eg.) being almost completely inundated about 6000 years ago. So it rather was noticed, as the land bridge across the mainland-Tasmania route was eventually drowned, preventing the inhabitants from migrating either north or south.

The various papers MacDougall is mindlessly channelling are extremely disingenuous, deliberately cherry-picking start/end dates. But at least we’re not now arm-waving over hundredths of 1C degree over 1000 years, although MacDougall appears not to have noticed that satellite altimetry wasn’t very active in 1750, so the base sea level from that period needs to be determined by other more uncertain means – hence the disingenuous cherry-picking.

Ian,
Same old tosh from you. I wish I could post two photos here: one of the Flim-Flan Man’s waterfront property and one of mine. I have accepted your challenge and am building on a block 1.5M above the king-tide highwater mark. I will sleep soundly as the stormy waves crash on the shore.
So, here is a small challenge & a free kick for you and the 3.3mm/year simple folk. Based on this established fact name one geologically stable place in the world where the sea has risen 30cms in the last 100years. Too hard to find such consistency over such a long period? OK, tell me the name of place where sea rise is equal to or greater than 15cms in the past 50 years.
I know this is quite short in climate terms, but there must surely be hundreds to choose from.

If you are struggling, try measuring from Captain Ross’s 1841 high water mark in Hobart that you can find on the late John Daly’s blog. http://www.john-daly.com/. A check of the reference point in 2004 shows that the water level has not changed in the intervening 160 years. A similar mark in Sydney Harbour produces the same result. Just two curious, coincidental anomalies that show no discernible sea level rise? I think not. What has changed is the honesty of the scientists responsible for measuring and mapping our climate and all that that entails.

No doubt you can set me on the true shining light path by naming the two drowning sites with the greatest sea-level rises in the past 50 & 100 years?

P.S Do not embarrass yourself by naming Tuvalu or Kiribati, but choose carefully as your selections will be researched.

Lies, lies, all lies! The constant chant of ‘four legs good, two legs bad’from global warming groupies, both pro and con, obscures the truth about the future climate. Irrefutable sunspot evidence shows that the Sun is heading into a grand solar minimum. Read up on that if you want your family to survive the coming catastrophic global famine.

This is my bottom line. The NSW government has allowed the development of high-rise to occur literally on the waterfront at Barrangaroo. If there was any doubt the building would be higher up on safer ground. Look at the ‘evidence’ of what people really think; judge them by their actions. And I speak about the NSW government.

The visible proof of the notion of imminent rising sea levels is that building right there on Sydney harbour, irrespective of who built it. That’s the symbol, as far as I’m concerned, about the extent of national ‘concern’. I make no comment one way or the other as to whether actual sea levels are rising because I just don’t know, but I suspect Keating would have had something to say about his beloved Barrangaroo if he thought the building would have been under water in 50 years’ time!!

Yes, many in NSW have been corrupt since Askin. But John Howard said recently that the federal parliament was largely free of corruption.

WARMEST greetings!( The very warmest.)
If you have not already done so, I would urge you to get hold of a copy of Ian Plimer, Heaven + Earth, published by Conor Court. In it, Plimer assembles what he asserts is the full scientific case against mainstream climatology. And he does us all a service, I believe, in the way he dismisses temperatures, as measured by ground-based thermometers, as evidence of global warming. Any thermometry evidence against his case he also dismisses as methodologically contaminated, due to the ‘heat island effect’ in particular.
Moreover, he is a geologist, and by all evidence I have seen, a very competent one, holding two professorships simultaneously. He dismisses evidence from tide gauges on the ground that isostatic movements of the Earth’s crust (eg post-glacial rebound) so complicate the story as to render any data therefrom useless.
However, satellite altimetry comes to the rescue. The satellites are constantly measuring their altitude above the Earth’s centre of mass, rendering isostasy, tides etc, irrelevant. They do not solely measure their altitude above the surface of the Earth.
It is this rise, and only this one, that I hold to be important as evidence that the planet is warming. The University of Colorado has a continuous and on-going sea-level study, and their evaluations are posted at http://sealevel.colorado.edu/.
I have not bothered to check on how they arrive at their results, or their methodology. I am sure that if there was any fault with it, the Climategate Brigade by now would have been down on them like the proverbial ton of bricks.
And so, you may or may not be safe from rising water. Your land, geologically stable or otherwise, may be moving so as to cancel out the effect of sea-level rise: or to amplify the effect, as the case may be.

Nobody said the planet ISN’T warming.
Nobody said the planet ISN’T warming.?????
How about: “Unlike the ABC, Nine is entitled to splash its cash on whatever frivolities it chooses. I’m not a shareholder and shouldn’t care. But when it peddles specious nonsense cloaked in the name of science and, in doing so, helps to further cement the global warming scare in the public mind, then I, yes, I do get pretty riled.”
I wonder who said that.http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2016/08/60-minutes-seal-approval/#comment-17340
(NB: I am standing by for a redefinition of global warming scare to bring those two statements into perfect and harmonic alignment.)

Peter:
“Global warming scare = the hypothesis, as yet unproven after more than 30 years of intense study, that human CO2 emissions are warming the world with catastrophic effect.”
Congratulations. That is a classic, and a textbook example of the guarded statement.
1. “Nobody said the planet isn’t warming.” I take it you still stand by that. So “nobody said the planet isn’t warming” = the planet IS warming. Well done!! BUT…..
2. Presumably human GHG emissions (mainly of CO2) can’t be doing it. The hypothesis is still unproven, “more than 30 years” (!) after Arrhenius, in 1896 (!) first advanced it with experimental evidence to back it up. (In 1896!). Even Tony (‘climatology is crap’) Abbott said that CO2 did make ‘some contribution’ to global warming; or equally cautious and guarded words to that effect.
So what in your view would constitute ‘proof’? Here we get down to the philosophical basis of science, which only deals in probabilities. Do we have to wait till the planet cooks? (For that matter, has it been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Earth is round?)
More to the point, has the hypothesis been proved that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) will alter the ozone layer of the atmosphere sufficient to affect the biosphere below it? There is experimental evidence in support of that, but until we release enough CFCs to actually destroy the O3 layer, that hypothesis will still lack final and confirmatory proof. That little philosophical problem did not stop the world’s governments banning CFCs. Civilisation and the biosphere did not get sacrificed on the altar of final indubitable proof, untrammelled free enterprise and the rights of the spray can.
CO2 traps heat, and is being added to the atmosphere by combustion of fossil carbon. The atmosphere and oceans are warming. On the face of it, there is probably a connection there. The CSIRO and a whole lot of other scientific organisations believe so.

On the face of it, yes. But how much impact is that having? We don’t know. We know that CO2 plays a role in trapping heat, but we don’t know how much impact it plays in the earth’s atmosphere given that there are much stronger green-house gasses also present, e.g. water vapour. What we *do* know is all energy that arrives at the Earth’s surface comes from the sun and that heat energy makes irrelevant any heat we produce. We also know that the sun’s luminous intensity (energy output) varies, as does the amount of Earth’s crust receiving that energy (relative distance from the centre of Earth’s elliptical orbit, different amounts of Earth’s crust receiving this intensity based on proximity in Northern or Southern solstices). These are all determined by predictable Newtonian physics and solar science.

I posted a link above to a research paper published in Nature that has shown 97.5% accuracy of sun-spot prediction over a millennium scale period based on the principle components of the pole-to-pole electromagnetic fields of the sun. These correspond to the 320 to 400 year grand solar cycle (modulating the minor 11 – 22 year solar cycles). There’s strong evidence that sun-spot activity impacts global climate by increasing the amount of energy reaching the earth’s surface.

Can you name a climatic model/simulation derived from global carbon dioxide growth estimates that as simply — i.e without specious tweaking — is able to provide as-strong predictive accuracy over large spans of time? (Occam’s Razor…)

Ultimately it comes down to this claim: if we can’t prove (low p-value) the role carbon dioxide has played in the past history of the earth, then we can’t dismiss the possibility that the obvious elephant in the room — the sun — is the major influencing factor on global climate variability, especially considering that new models have predicted the previous Maunder minimum from back-testing to 97.5% accuracy.

As stated in other posts, we don’t know what is the ideal amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and whether it’s too late already. There’s very little basis on which to cut emissions given we don’t know these values, let alone on a massive subsidising and wealth transfer to the 3rd world which we know will just stimulate further rapid population growth and ecological destruction, war, etc and impoverish the West. The West can work to cut its dependency on fossil fuels if it’s concerned about energy security and that’s about the only reasonable argument for taxing carbon emissions. Given we don’t know the desirable carbon dioxide percentage, the only possible solution to the problem given that it might be catastrophic is to stop all emissions immediately; eliminate humans from the face of the earth. Funny how the ridiculous growth in the human population, the measurable exponential ecological destruction and the West’s contribution to that through food and medical aid is conveniently sidelined and indeed lambasted as racist by the oh-so-concerned Watermelons.

We’ll know in the next 2 decades if the solar activity predictions of a new mini ice-age are right. My feeling is that it won’t matter anyway as once the West has fallen into civil war the AGW issue will disappear from the global political scene, probably forever.

Ian, you have way too much faith in the ability of satellites to measure the rate at which global sea level is rising or falling. I love the stuff NASA & others have done over the years, but their claims that sea level can be measured from hundreds of kilometres away to an accuracy of 1 millimetre? you have got to be kidding! The flipping tides around the globe range from almost zero to 18 metres twice a day. Not only that, but I believe there a few things called waves that roll continuously across the oceans. Now, if they were claiming to measure the level of a small lake, yep, they could that, but not the constantly changing level of 70% of the earth’s surface. If you believe that, I have a great bridge that you will want. Call me

Noted.
The accuracy claimed is to ± 0.4 mm/yr (CSIRO). They apparently believe it, as does your beloved NASA. Also the other scientific organisations I quoted above.
Why not offer your bridge to one of them? Surely one of them would be dumb enough to buy it. By your reckoning.

A propos Antarctica, a lot of intriguing stuff going on below 40 south latitude. Indeed, one could argue a “no-warming-at-all” case, based on official (sparse) datasets including http://www.Berkeleyearth.org. In fact,perhaps UN should be applying a “Southern Hemisphere correction factor’ to all its AGW claims.

With all the warming chatter, some folk seem to have forgotten that in 2015 there was more snow in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, since measurements began 35 years ago; that Southern Australia also had its coldest winter in over quarter of century, with snow in Hobart for first time since 1986, and Antarctic sea-ice at record levels, 8+% above LT average.

Whatever is happening below 45-50 south latitude, hard to see a anthropogenic global warming finger/footprint here:

Winter 2015 – “For some it was on the cool side. Victorians shivered through a mean temperature (the average of the maximum and minimum) of just 8.3 °C; the coldest since the last big El Niño year of 1997. Melbournians had the coldest winter in nearly 30 years (1989) and the coldest night in nearly 20 years. Tasmania had its coldest winter in nearly 50 years with a State mean temperature of just 5.8 °C (Table 1).”

To put a ‘warming spin’ on the above facts, just “homogenise” them across the entire country. Good try, guys, but still snow down to sea-level at Clifton Beach near Hobart.

As for sea-level rise, even NASA recently opined: “The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away.”

To understand how the CAGW scam will end, it serves to remember what it is – a means to an end. The end in question is a massive wealth transfer program driven by a socialist agenda. A secondary, but no less important, end is making a few folks very, very, VERY wealthy.

So, the end will come about when (1) it gets too hard to keep the busted tyre inflated and (2) a better scare tactic/scam comes along that can be used to achieve aforementioned end(s).

The selective perception of those who adhere to the denialist/’sceptic’/ostrich/whatever party line at this site never ceases to amaze me.
Pure venality is held to be the motivation of the climatologists. They are just in it for the research grants. Meanwhile, Big Carbon: the big miners and big users, (those Bob Brown was inclined to call the ‘big polluters’) have motives that are uncritically accepted as squeaky clean.
Steve, though I hold an opposing view to yours, I would advise you in connection with the financial motivations and rewards of the players in this carbon game: don’t go there. You will only get burnt.

Yet another straw man, maliciously imputing comments that were never made to people who never made them then attacking them for it. Standard leftoid dishonest glibness, very unintelligent.

Try Noble Cause Corruption, MacDougall. We’ve all noticed you never address the actual detail of the argument, just arm wave and repeat speculative model hypotheses as facts. This is the peak tricky of moral vanity.

ianl (or whatever your real name is):
Have a look at the very top of your screen, where this article you are commenting on begins:
“Taxpayer-funded warmists have no need for sacramental confession to expiate the sins of their wild inaccuracies and habitually incorrect prophecies. As a recent spate of amended theories demonstrates, they just make up new ‘facts’ and keep those grants rolling in.”
As it is the intro to an article by Peter O’Brien, it is possible that he wrote it. Or it may have been editor’s doing: but I can’t imagine that Peter O’Brien was unaware of it.
That is a pretty unambiguous statement of belief that the ‘taxpayer-funded warmists’ (who can only be mainstream climatologists) in receipt of ‘grants’ are no more than a bunch of charlatans in it for the taxpayer-supplied money. In other words, venal and corrupt.
Care to revise your assessment of me?

The quote “Research published in Nature today [and] led by Australian National University Professor Nerilie Abram concludes the warming of the planet may have started as early as 1830.”, is surely correct as both Charles Sturt in 1828 at Buddah Lake near Trangie N.S.W. and Sir Thomas Mitchell in 1845 at the Bogan river NSW, recorded temperatures in the shade of 53.9 degrees Centigrade. The CO2 levels in the atmosphere at those times are estimated as around 300ppm and the industrial revolution had barely started but there can be no doubt mankind was the cause of these incredibly high temperatures, according to the catastropharians. Of course, homogenisation of the data from that period will soon show the temperatures weren’t anywhere near as high as 53.0 Degrees C.

Ian McD,
You are repeating yourself: “Stop continually serving up the same old denialostrich garbage, again and again and again and again again and again and again and again…. (Do I have to go on?)” Yes, please go on and answer the denialist questions I posed:
“… name one geologically stable place in the world where the sea has risen 30cms in the last 100years. Too hard to find such consistency over such a long period? OK, tell me the name of place where sea rise is equal to or greater than 15cms in the past 50 years.
I know this is quite short in climate terms, but there must surely be hundreds to choose from.”

And too remind you: you have never answered my other two simple questions:
1. What is the ideal concentration of CO2 that we seek? and
2. What is the ideal average global climate temperature” We are at 15C and are told by the Priests of Gaia that at 17C we will reach a tipping point and fry & die. So, are we too warm already?

If you do not know your destination then as the brainless Tin Man said in Wizard of Oz: ‘Any road will take you there.” Actually, I think it means we are lost and haven’t a clue where we are going.

Check out my response to you September 12, 2016 at 1:00 pm.
That will (a) have to do, and
(b) probably not be enough to terminate your infinite wait.
In which case, you will have to wait on: perhaps till Old Nick has bought himself a pair of ice blades, and is happily skating about on the frozen lakes of Hell.
Then again, perhaps you might care to join him.

Ian,
Let me summarise your position for you:
1. You cannot name a geologically stable place in the world where the sea level has risen 30cm in 100 years, but you have faith that such a place must exist.
2. You cannot name a geologically stable place in the world where the sea level has risen 15cm in 50 years, but you have faith that such a place must exist.
3. You cannot tell the sceptical deniers what the ideal global temperature should be, but you have faith the 15C is already too warm and a 2C+ increase would be deadly. So you have no idea of the temperature destination you seek but you want us to believe you have the answer and should follow you where?
4. You cannot tell the sceptical deniers what the ideal global concentration of CO2 should be, but you have faith the 400ppm is already too much even though our plant food supply is struggling due to CO2 poverty. You said you were a farmer, I believe, but if so then your aim of reducing CO2 would be deadly. So you have no idea of the CO2 levels destination but want us to believe you have the answer and should follow you where?

You never answer the question because you cannot as you have drunk the Klimate Kool-Aid and have no idea beyond chanting your endless Ómm, Omm, Kumbayah mantra. I will take you seriously when you give straight answers.

By the way, the world has warmed in the past 150 years (thank goodness), but the keywords are that this is not unprecedented, it is not scary, it is not related to 400 parts per 1,000,000 of a vital trace gas, GW is not caused by the efforts and outputs of puny mankind and 3,000ppm of CO2 would be hugely beneficial. Trust me – as I trust you.
Name two detrimental results from each of 2C warming and 1,000ppm of CO2 and then demonstrate your open mind by listing two benefits. I can do it, even with the magic of kaleidoscopic Komputer models.

As any KGB interrogator will tell you: he who asks the questions sits in the power chair. So I am not inclined to dance about to your tune. The following will have to do:
1. Don’t have to and don’t need to. Satellite altimetry renders all that inconsequential.
2. Ditto.
3. CO2 concentration has now increased to 27% above its calculated pre-industrial atmospheric level. Put into that context, it is no trifle. From NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS):
“Previously published research shows that a dangerous level of global warming will occur if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds a concentration of about 450 parts per million. That’s equivalent to about a 61 percent increase from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million, but only 17 percent more than the current level of 385 parts per million. The carbon dioxide cap is related to a global temperature rise of about 1.8°F [1.0 degree C – IM] above the 2000 global temperature, at or beyond which point the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet and Arctic sea ice could set in motion feedbacks and lead to accelerated
melting.” https://noahsarc.wordpress.com/plimers-climatology-6-his-lordships-list
I have neither the time nor resources to assess that. I choose to take their [GISS] word for it, over that of the shills of the fossil carbon industry.
4. Ditto repeato.

Ian,
This is the last time I will waste time in answering your tosh. You can continue to spout your unsubstantiated cultist views, but I will no longer read them. I would rather poke myself in the eye with a pencil than debate a jellyfish like you. You failed (as expected) to give a rational answer to simple questions as to why we should pursue an amoral course of action that will impoverish the world for no benefit. You really are from the era of 1984 and all that that entails. You are also proof that neither evolution nor education has advanced very far at all.
Now, I need to get on with building my shore front home, so must stop wasting my time replying to an inert troll.
Bye for all time.